Worlds Without End

"Rubenstein grounds the current debate on the plurality of universes on solid scholarship, skillfully exploring its historical and philosophical roots."

—Marcelo Gleiser, Dartmouth College

"This is a text that performs the “many-oneness” of this multiverse whose history and potentiality it maps. As she traces the startling philosophical depths, mystical ancestry and scientific shocks of this cosmic boundlessness, Rubenstein’s brilliance sparkles like its innumerable stars."

—Catherine Keller, author of Face of the Deep and Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew University

"Some physicists suggest that our cosmos has been caught in an endless loop, repeatedly cycling between big bangs since time immemorial. In Worlds Without End, Mary-Jane Rubenstein provides a remarkable tour of how such ideas -- and competing ideas about whether our universe is embedded within some larger multiverse -- have likewise been cycling throughout Western thought for millennia. This deeply learned excavation is a rare accomplishment: a page-turner that broaches large questions about science, philosophy, and religion. Fascinating."

—David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, MIT and author of How the Hippies Saved Physics

"We are living through a Golden Age of cosmology, when observations reveal a universe 13.8 billion years big and new theories and new evidence vie with each other almost on a daily basis. Mary-Jane Rubenstein is an expert guide to this dramatic scene, an historian and speculative cosmologist with a critical eye. Uncovering humorous comparisons with the past, for instance the way the Stoic, Catholic and Hindu cosmologies have been reborn anew, she shows our Golden Age is tarnished in only a few ways. We cannot tell which of the many-world hypotheses is the right one, whether they exist under an integrated set of laws, and we may never be able to so. But the quest continues, and produces many profound insights. Rubenstein shows the way scientific world-views no less than other ones grow from the kind of questions we ask, how metaphysics and physics are mutually entangled, and how the many worlds of her title emerge, again and again over two thousand years, often in spite of their authors’ intentions, and taste. A witty and mature view of views."

—Charles Jencks